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So I've beaten it. I have to say it does get better. When you have a full arsenal of guns that you're constantly switching between you tend to run out of ammo a lot less.

I don't think I like the persistent ammo stock pile the way they've set it up. Here is how the mechanics of the game go in a nutshell:

Very low ammo caps, (ie. completely upgraded you can hold a max of 24 shotgun shells) Replenished through pickups in the enviornment (rare) or through combat with chainsaw + other methods
Same deal with armor and health, start with 50 and 100 respectively and both are upgradeable
1 UP powerups basically revive you instantly the moment you die.
BFG ammo is only collectible in the environment and is shared with the Unmaker weapon (it's an unlockable) (limited to 2 shots)
Crucible sword uses charges, can hold 3. Only collectible from the environment.
Flame belch, chainsaw, and grenade ammo is unlimited, with a cooldown between shots.

Thing is... If you're low on BFG ammo, or 1UP lives, or Crucible charges. They don't recharge between missions. You have to replay missions where you know there are pickups available to replenish.
This might not even be that big of a deal, but all of the bonus fights (gore nests) you encounter can be failed if they are timed, or if you die while in a slayer gate (mega gore nest, same thing really) you return to the level you were playing.

but any ammo or 1UPs you use there don't revert back to where you were before you started if you fail. Meaning failing over and over again until you get it right just isn't an option, or you wont be able to complete the level because you've been trying too hard to do the bonus combat encounters (which give you collectibles to beef up the Doomslayer)

Worst case scenario at any given moment: Low on ammo and no "fodder" enemies to chainsaw. You can chainsaw nearly every enemy in the game, but you need to have 3 gasoline charges to do it if they are anything other than a zombie, imp, or soldier, and you only regenerate 1 charge, the final 2 have to be picked up.

I DO like, given that they've made the game so fucking hard, that changing difficulty mid game doesn't hinder your progress. Neither does using cheat codes that you find as collectibles. (they just bar you from doing Slayer gates so you cant get the harder collectibles) This is great for replaying levels where you missed some secrets. I went back and played 3 or 4 levels where I missed the fast travel prompt, to continue hunting down secrets, and did so with unlimited ammo and unlimited 1UPs, and got to keep my collectibles.

It's actually not very hard to 100% this game as far as finding all the secrets (however the timed combat encounters have to be completed successfully in order to collect the reward). If you see it on your map appear nearby. The way in should be accessible to you, it was very rare that you had to progress further in the level to find the secret. Just exploration and checking your map as you clear the fog of war was enough for me to 100% this game without a guide on my first playthrough.

It's still a mixed bag for me, but I have to admit, after I wrote my last post it started to click a little bit. There were still times when I had to stop playing because it just got too damn hard. Those fucking Marauders are the worst, and there is a reason people are complaining about them. I found a combo I could use to defeat them that worked every time, but that never made it easy to do.

I started on Ultra Violence, but had to turn down to Hurt Me plenty after the 3rd level because it wasn't any fun. Then I spent the rest of the game switching between that and I'm Too Young To Die. Usually for Slayer gates, and sometimes boss fights. I couldn't beat the game on medium difficulty. I finished on easy.

Regarding the soundtrack.

One of the guys at iD released an open letter explaining the whole thing from his side of the story. So long story short this is what I understand from a bunch of different interviews and podcasts I listened to that had Mick as a guest.

He didn't compose the soundtrack as full tracks. he composed them as little vertical slices that belonged to the same composition for the wwise to mix into the game in snippets dynamically to follow the player. So the OST takes a bit longer because he has to actually splice those slices together to make something that resembles a track you'd listen to.

Normally when this kind of thing happens the composer will give the devs stems. Which would be more like horizontal slices. The guitars, drums, piano, vocals, etc, on different audio tracks to be mixed together. Doom Eternal doesn't 'mix' the music, it just sequences it as you play. But because the music was going in a game Mick compressed the crap out of it so it was normalized to be as loud as fuck the whole time you were playing because video game. So the OST needed to have a different mix so that it would sound nuanced and have dynamic range.

Bethesda was worried because Mick didn't have the OST done in time to release the game, and there are laws in places (the EU I think?) that gives people the option to have a full refund if what is delivered on launch day isn't what they paid for. But they gave mick a 4 week extension anyway, and the people who preordered the Collectors edition either had to wait or ask for a refund. When he still wasn't going to get it done, they had their in house audio guy do the sequencing of the tracks Mick has provided to be used in game as a backup option to release the OST.

Long story short. Mick didn't deliver, in the end he sent them 12 tracks. They wanted it to include every possible "song" in the game, and I think Mick just didn't think that was necessary. In the end it was 59 tracks long and almost 4 hours. The iD guy doing the sequencing's name is Chad Mossholder, and after the soundtrack came out, and nobody knew the difference anyway, somebody with some knowledge noticed that most of the tracks were compressed as hell and had no dynamic range. So the neckbeards got ahold of the news, saw some tweets and reddit exchanges between Mick and some fans, and started sending hate mail to Bethesda, iD, and Chad.

I think the misnomer here is that Chad didn't actually "MIX" anything at all. Every single track on the official OST was mixed by Mick. All he did was splice most of the tracks together from pieces to make something that seems like a cohesive musical composition. The dude had shit to work with and didn't deserve the shit he got, from either Mick or the fans.

As far as I can tell. Mick dropped the ball a bit, but also Bethesda wanted something insane (a 4 hour soundtrack), and Chad is a MF'n hero for getting what he did done and didn't deserve the shit he got, and Mick did nothing public to stick up for Chad.

The whole experience of this game is a bit sour, which is why I keep saying it's a bit of a miss, or a mixed bag. Seems silly to worry about a soundtrack, but I think the truth is that without it, new Doom wouldn't be as good as it is.

It's too bad. I really like Mick, this wont stop me from enjoying what he does. And it wont stop me from enjoying iD games when they don't suck, even if they're part of one of the evil empires of gaming right now.

Do you guys ever seriously read all this shit that I type? I need more hobbies apparently.

According to the game producer, Mick had to deliver 12 tracks at minimum for the OST. He didn't meet the deadline and asked for another 4 weeks, promising that he would come up with up to 30 tracks. He got extension to almost 6 weeks, without his bonus docked for the late delivery. Ultimately he delivered 9 tracks, and these were mostly ambient tracks, not combat-focused ones. Poor Chad had to do most of the heavy lifting, combining what he already got from Mick with some of his own work. At least he was credited as contributing artist. Not sure how reasonable or unreasonable Bethesda requests and deadlines were, but it looks like Mick acted a bit like a moody superstar here.

Yeah, while I like Mick's work in general, the way he comes off from all of these accounts isn't great.

VA: well, I read the entire thing. I know Jeshibu shares the same reservations as you do about the ammo pool and the optional challenges, with ammo not refilling and thus leaving you boned if you want to get on with the rest of the level. Seems like something they should have tuned for, or at least reverted ammo counts at the end of each attempt.

Mick's going to have a very hard time getting work after it. It's one thing to not fulfill your end of a contract, and another to slag your employer off publicly on social media afterward. That is remembered.

They just pushed an update that makes the game require Denuvo Anti-Cheat, which by all accounts is an extremely invasive, always-on Windows service which slows down everything on your PC (while also being detected as a virus by many anti-virus programs.)

You can't even start the game to play single-player without installing it, and it's not possible to roll back the update.
I really don't want to install that thing, so now I can't play the game I just bought.

They just pushed an update that makes the game require Denuvo Anti-Cheat, which by all accounts is an extremely invasive, always-on Windows service which slows down everything on your PC (while also being detected as a virus by many anti-virus programs.)

You can't even start the game to play single-player without installing it, and it's not possible to roll back the update.
I really don't want to install that thing, so now I can't play the game I just bought.

I uninstalled before the update downloaded, it was queued. I guess I'm lucky in that I already beat it.

as far as I'm concerned they need not have bothered with multiplayer unless they were going to release a full map editor for free. Brutal Doom + Classic wads and Doomseeker is the only way to my Doom MP for me.

They just pushed an update that makes the game require Denuvo Anti-Cheat, which by all accounts is an extremely invasive, always-on Windows service which slows down everything on your PC (while also being detected as a virus by many anti-virus programs.)

Are you confusing it for Starforce? Denuvo doesn't run when you're not playing the game, and verifiable performance impact as far as I've seen varies from no effect to at most a few FPS, and a few seconds extra on first-time-startup load times. There was some hysteria a few years ago about it killing SSDs, but that turned out to be bunk too.

I mean, I'm not a fan of DRM in general, but there is a lot of misinformation on the Internet about Denuvo, mostly put out by the pirate community.

You mean to say he's not doing that crazy Youtube personality thing on purpose?

He was doing troll reviews well before he hit up Youtube. So it's not really that surprising that his video presence is several orders of magnitude worse, but what really gets me is that once in a while the things he says make sense; but even when I agree with what he's saying, his presentation of it makes me want to punch his face into the moon.

Originally Posted by Anarchic Fox

Nailed it, except for the "rejected" part. The Batman franchise never rejects a sufficiently enthusiastic villain.

A dear friend of mine is a big Sterling fan... maybe I'll ask her to explain the appeal.

Hah. Yeah, he's a low-rent Penguin like NV mentioned. As for the appeal, I think I get it already - lowbrow comedy gets attention, especially when it's paired with comic exaggeration and snide disdain. In other words, Sterling's audience is probably the same as John Walker's.

In other words, Sterling's audience is probably the same as John Walker's.

Nowadays John Walker's audience is indie hipsters like me, since the bulk of his writing occurs at Buried Treasure. The site's mission statement is to only review games Walker likes, which is funny after he gained his reputation off negative reviews. Sterling's channel seems much more topical.